My GX10 died

Everything ran fine,

I was using UD 3.6 Q6 for 35 and 27B, each 4 concurrent requests at 200K context.
I had Dify and Mastra to play around with, Unsloth studio to get around to and vLLM ready for whenever I decided to do some more testing.
LLama-swap above lama.cpp and liteLLM with semantic routing.
And a nice dashboard.

But yesterday morning after nothing much hit my local machine, Ubuntu wasn’t booting.
Nvme got corrupted, I figured it was an update going wrong.

Well, the keyboard didn’t respond anymore so I did a RTC/EC reset and poked around a bit, at least I got into the BIOS and ran the nvme tests (passed).
So I got on the Asus website and got the image for a bootable USB. To actually use it, I swapped keyboards and monitors because that was faster than power draining and resetting the CMOS again.

New image installed, so I am at 1008, I start updating and my WiFi extender just quits, seems like a known bug in the graphics drivers froze the screen and the WiFi driver was also known to cause issues.

Since an open ssh session could still encode the reboot and not much else, I tried that but black screen again.

Great, now the screen goes to UEFI recovery… after some tinkering I get to GRUB and see the 1008 and 1026 options both with a recovery version present but none load.

I try to use the USB again but now the CMOS won’t clear and the power button lights up only after a power drain and even then after trying it again after 20 seconds and then waiting a minute or 2, it decides it finds me worthy.

Ok, time to leave it on its own for an hour while unplugged and do something else. I plug it back in and nothing happens. So I leave it for ten minutes and check the fan, which I can’t hear. The GX10 is warm but the magic smoke doesn’t come out.

I fill in the RMA thinking they’ll find a way to charge me for repairs blaming me for not correctly handling all this.

So now I’m left with a sour taste after calling Asus support through this all, who hardly even know about the machine they sell, and finally making the RMA. So I call the computer store I bought it from and while their business support isn’t answering in the weekend, their general support tells me the RMA has to go through them and they do an internal investigation first.

So I am wondering if this happens only to me, if I fucked up somehow, and what caused all this.

The weather is nice, I’m having a BBQ later so it’ll be temporarily forgotten, I just wanted to share the tale.